Mm… good point.

My rhetorical question aside, yes - it’s plain that what Zelenskyy’s actually doing is putting Trump on the spot.

But I hadn’t put together that the specific phrasing of it also strokes Trump’s ego - that’s a nice touch

No he doesn’t.

Does he?

No - he can’t possibly. He’s not that stupid. He knows just as well as anyone and better than most that Trump can never be trusted, and especially when it comes to his idol Putin.

So he has to know that Russia could methodically reject or violate every single aspect of this deal, and Trump will just smile and nod and say, “Whatever you want Vladdy!”

So this has to be just a bit of careful rhetoric - an attempt by Zelenskyy to make the responsibility the US necessarily has for this deal manifest, so that he’ll have something to point to later on, when Trump inevitably betrays him.

The really unfortunate thing is that this is nothing new.

Congress, pathetic, privileged cowards that they are, has been ceding power to the executive branch for decades now, and that’s a lot of what’s made the Trump/Musk coup d’etat possible in the first place.

While it’s especially pointed and unfortunate right now, with the presidency in the tiny hands of a raving lunatic bent on destroying democracy primarily because it stands in the way of his fragile ego’s squalling need to believe that he’s the bestest president ever in the history of ever, I have no doubt that if tariffs had become a sufficiently controversial subject at any point in the last few decades, Congress would’ve done the same, entirely regardless of specifically whose ass was warming the seat in the Oval Office.

They must’ve misread “peace prize” as “piece-of-shit prize.”

That’s Dictatorship 101 - if the experts say you’re wrong, get rid of the experts.

Ah… this is such a perfectly Trump story. The Onion couldn’t have done a better job of it.

The fate of the western world has been placed in the hands of a man who’s the emotional equivalent of a four-year-old competing for daddy’s attention.

I guess I should’ve been clearer.

He’s obviously both. He’s more of a lying sack of shit than he is an idiot.

And as I just tried to point out elsewhere, that’s not to say that he’s not an idiot - just that he’s even more of a liar.

I didn’t say he was smart - I said he’s even more a lying sack of shit than he is an idiot.

To be fairish, he’s more a lying sack of shit than an idiot, but that aside…

Oh boohoo - somebody maybe said mean things to him while he was using his daughter as a human shield (or maybe they didn’t and he’s lying).

And meanwhile, parents in Ukraine are digging their children’s corpses out from under rubble.

It’s so awesome to have a president who doesn’t just stop at being corrupt, but actually adds extra layers of corruption on top of the original ones.

He’s like the Monty Python spam skit - “Corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption, fascism, and corruption.”

Weird how he suddenly turns into a dove when it comes to Russia’s strongest ally in the Middle East.

Almost as if his actual loyalty isn’t to America at all, but to Russia.

Seems to be a lot of that going around lately.

I access lemmy through Firefox, and I just have bookmarks for all of my accounts and have whichever ones I’m using the most pinned. Switching from one to another is just a matter of clicking a link.

I don’t know of any way to combine everything into one feed, though I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more of the apps will do it. That’s exactly the opposite of what I value though - I don’t want just one feed - I want whichever feed I happen to be in the mood for at the moment.

Ah - I get a chance to preach.

I think it makes a lot of sense, and I’ve been trying to convince people of that since I’ve been here. It costs nothing and provides benefits, and what more could anyone want?

When I first came to Lemmy, I couldn’t figure out any reason to pick one specific instance, and I finally decided that the only way to know if it mattered was to create multiple accounts and compare them. So I did.

I sort of intended to eventually settle on one, but as it turned out, I never really did, and in fact have added a number of accounts since.

The first and most notable thing I discovered is that every instance is different. Unsurprisingly, specialty instances like ani.social and literature.cafe are different from the general instances, but even the general instances differ from each other just depending on which other instances they’re federated with and which communities they carry.

I default to All on most instances, and All on lemm.ee, for instance, is significantly different from All on Sopuli, or from All on dbzer0, or from All on Beehaw, and so on. So I can effectively tailor my experience simply by using different accounts.

I generally have about three general accounts that I cycle between, with another few specialty ones - either specialized by topic, like ani.social, or specialized by bias, like .ml. I find that’s enough so that pretty much no matter what I’m in the mood for, I have an account that fits.

Additionally, from a more simple practical perspective, instances change over time, and are sometimes shut down entirely. That’s never directly affected my experience, since I always have other accounts. So for instance, when .world started to decline, I just stopped using it, and when lemmy.ninja shut down (RIP), I just spent more time on other instances. And as new instances pop up, or just come to my attention, I just make an account, then take them for a test drive and see what I think. I’ve discovered a number of good instances that way.

So… yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense and it’s pretty much effortless and entirely free, so there’s no reason not to do it.

Deliberately.

The long-term goal is to make housing even less affordable, then criminalize homelessness, so that poor people can be fed into the prison-for-profit system and made into slaves.